Mesa 17.3 With RADV Vulkan Running Great With Polaris, Starts To Outperform AMDGPU-PRO

Yesterday I posted some fresh benchmarks of the RX Vega between the AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV open-source vs. AMDGPU-PRO drivers, which showed the pure open-source driver stack performing admirably well for the latest-generation AMD graphics architecture and the community-driven RADV Vulkan driver was even performing nicely. Due to how well RADV has matured during the Mesa 17.3 cycle, here are some benchmarks using a Radeon RX 580 "Polaris" graphics card showing off its more mature support for Vulkan.

The tests today are using the MSI Radeon RX 580 and comparing AMDGPU-PRO 17.30 on Ubuntu 17.04 to that of AMDGPU DRM-Next + Mesa 17.3-dev + LLVM 6.0 SVN via the Padoka PPA for the updated user-space driver components.

The currently available Linux Vulkan games of Dota 2, Dawn of War III, Mad Max, Serious Sam 3 BFE, and Talos Principle were used for benchmarking. Besides comparing AMDGPU-PRO vs. RADV for Vulkan, some OpenGL comparison results for these games are also available for putting the numbers in better overall perspective.

All of these OpenGL/Linux benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and standardized manner using the Phoronix Test Suite.